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QuantumNomad_

1,460 karma · joined August 4, 2025

https://github.com/Quantum-Nomad
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QuantumNomad_··on Can’t fish Ethernet? Use “invisible” fiber instead
I had to buy a new crimping tool a while ago because I couldn’t find the one I had from a few years before.

I ended up buying a small kit containing both crimping tool and a couple of additional tools.

One of the tools included is an Ethernet cable tester. It has two parts; one for each end of the cable. The part on one side is powered by 9V battery (same one used in smoke detectors etc).

You connect the parts to the RJ45 plugs of each side. And it has individual LEDs for each of the eight leads in the cable. They are lit up in sequence. Any that don’t light up means that that pin is not properly connected, or the cable is broken.

And using that tool is how I found out the reason one of the router ports report 100M instead of 1000M connection. Half of the leads on the cable connected to that port are damaged or not properly connected! And the four that are working are the ones needed for 100M.

I remember that when I originally crimped that cable years ago I was struggling for quite a while, getting no connection at first until after a couple of attempts I got it connected. I didn’t notice at the time, nor for a long time after, that it was only a 100M connection. And it took until I had this tool to figure out the why of it being only 100M.

QuantumNomad_··on HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN
There’s enough videos in that pile to watch for a long time. I don’t think HackerTube needs to keep pulling updated comments.

And if it’s frozen in time there won’t be any reason to spam irrelevant YouTube links to HS either.

QuantumNomad_··on Show HN: HackerBooks – HackerTube, but for books mentioned on HN
Well that one is easy!

- The Matrix (1999) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/

- Hackers (1995) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/

- Sneakers (1992) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0105435

- Jurassic Park (1993) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/

- The Terminator (1984) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0088247

- WarGames (1983) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/

There you go, that’s the entire list :)

QuantumNomad_··on HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN
Take down notice for what exactly though?

It doesn’t clone the actual front end code of YouTube, and it doesn’t even download the videos and rehost them on his own server either. All of the videos are normal embeds from YouTube.

QuantumNomad_··on HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN
Some videos can only play by going to YouTube, because they are age restricted.

For example this one:

https://hackertube.org/watch/RcU7FaEEzNU

QuantumNomad_··on GPT-5.6 Sol can beat Factorio on peaceful mode
> In some sense it proves to me that llms are not just copying and are actually creating a bespoke solution.

Is the weirdness of the designs meaningfully beneficial in any way that the AI has figured out, or could it for example be that the training data the LLMs learned from are too different from the type of data it would need to learn from in order to interface properly and play the game better? And then because of that incompleteness, the LLM has to hallucinate a lot and it results in weird outcomes.

QuantumNomad_··on Redox: Ring Buffers Project Summary
That is indeed the chemical reaction that creates rust, and they intentionally named their OS such for that very reason, as they are writing this OS in the Rust programming language. But I am not sure why you’d just comment that and nothing more. For a moment I thought you might be a bot instructed to “write a relevant comment for this title”. But your other comments in other threads seem human to me.
QuantumNomad_··on A/SIDE – Private photo sharing and encrypted messages
> Tech savvy users will convince their parents to join for pics of the grandchildren - who’s gonna say no?

Eh I dunno. At the moment we are using a WhatsApp group chat. It works reliably and everyone is happy.

If I were to move our families to a different app I’m on the hook for any and all usability difficulties, instabilities, network connectivity issues etc etc. Even when the issue is their own internet, they are going to think that the app I made them switch to is the problem.

I have enough things to deal with already. I’ll stick with WhatsApp for the foreseeable future unless Meta does something sufficiently annoying or bad to really make me leave it. I already left Facebook many years ago and deleted the account completely I had there. I kept my Instagram but the last couple of years I’ve been less and less and less active there. I don’t even have the instagram app installed on my newest second hand phone. So I only check it once a week or so, from the previous phone.

QuantumNomad_··on elect.horse
Also “related”, but only vaguely:

https://xkcd.com/936/

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b3_lVSrPB6w

:D

Anyone else got something horse adjacent?

QuantumNomad_··on Hermes and REA and GLM 5.3 = Reverse engineering TikTok app for less than $20
Thanks :)
QuantumNomad_··on Hermes and REA and GLM 5.3 = Reverse engineering TikTok app for less than $20
I don’t see any invite appearing in https://github.com/notifications?all=1
QuantumNomad_··on Hermes and REA and GLM 5.3 = Reverse engineering TikTok app for less than $20
I would like that too if you can :)

GitHub https://github.com/Quantum-Nomad

QuantumNomad_··on MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch
> the escape key became a virtual thing

Yeah I could see that being annoying.

On my MBP M1, the Esc key is physical one sitting in the same place as normal; top left. On the top right is the power / Touch ID button. And filling the space between them is the Touch Bar.

And I think the reason I like the Touch Bar is because being able to slide the screen brightness and the speaker volume up and down on it is both pretty quick and precise. Much more comfortable than only having volume up / down and screen brightness up / down buttons. And I can’t really think of anything that I am missing physical Fn buttons for in anything of what I am doing on the machine. Even booting into recovery mode does not involve use of any Fn keys. Just press and hold the power button when powering the machine on and keep holding it pressed until it goes to startup options.

QuantumNomad_··on MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch
I have a MBP M1 which has been my main laptop since it came out. I never really understood why so many people complained about the Touch Bar. In fact, I will kind of miss the Touch Bar when I eventually replace the MBP M1 with something else a few more years down the line.
QuantumNomad_··on Two high-speed trains collide near Toledo, Spain
Oh interesting, TIL :) Thanks!
QuantumNomad_··on The Agent SDK
Gotta justify that $160k/yr salary somehow I guess, and if the AI is writing all the code you used to write and your job is now to manage the AI, what better way to spend the days than making new AI tools and workflows and markdown files all day
QuantumNomad_··on Two high-speed trains collide near Toledo, Spain
In Oslo, Norway, we have train signaling errors all the time it feels like. It leads to a lot of delays and things. But I think that when these systems are not working, it is better to slow down everything even going as far as to put some trains on hold for some time, to avoid human errors in manual instruction and routing leading to crashes and deaths.
QuantumNomad_··on Tailscale SSH: Investigation and remediation update
I run WireGuard VPN on port 443 UDP. Many times I can connect to that from various public WiFi networks like coffee shops and public libraries. And then I ssh into my machines at home over my self-hosted VPN.

I’ve been hoping that HTTP3 adoption would make 443 UDP accessible from even more places. But maybe they already do the kind of thing you said for that too, looking at the traffic flow to determine that it is not HTTPS.

Weirdly sometimes there are WiFi networks where I am not able to connect to my WireGuard VPN on 443 UDP, but I can connect to servers over ssh on standard port 22 TCP. Perhaps they sometimes block all UDP traffic because they don’t want people to use BitTorrent etc, but one would think that with all the online meeting platforms that do video streaming there would be a lot of problems for people if all UDP traffic was blanket blocked.

I might eventually try out AmneziaWG instead of vanilla WireGuard, but at the moment I am fine not being able to Connect to my VPN sometimes. I only use it to connect to my other machines anyway, not as a VPN tunnel for my web browsing etc.

QuantumNomad_··on Show HN: TitleArt – Make text like it's 1997
The web is source available, and only partly. When I say open source I mean a permissive license like MIT, ISC, etc.
QuantumNomad_··on Birdwatching rewires the brain and slows cognitive decline
Sesame Street belongs to the people!
QuantumNomad_··on Show HN: TitleArt – Make text like it's 1997
Very nice! Would you consider making it open source and sharing it on GitHub? I’d love to be able to easily install it locally on my machine and also to reuse the retro look of it for my own other local tools.
QuantumNomad_··on I refuse to accept a censored Internet. Join Me at FOSDEM 27
> If it is distinguishable, can’t the machines do the distinguishing?

No? Just like they are not able to reliably tell if a piece of text was LLM written or not aside from by having access to the watermarking that some providers and models intentionally embed in the text.

> If crap is indistinguishable from substance, is it truly crap?

The crap is very very distinguishable. But there is so much of it we have to wade through, and it’s only getting worse.

QuantumNomad_··on Show HN: I put employees inside S&P 500 market-cap bubbles
1000 or 10k per stick figure is equally arbitrary.

What they actually need to do is scale the size of the stick people correctly.

For example, one meaningful measure might be to scale it so that one stick person fits inside a circle with area corresponding to the amount of money they have to earn in total for that number of people to cover all their living expenses and some amount of savings left over. I am sure some statistical bureau has some meaningful dollar amount of some sort that makes sense to use.

QuantumNomad_··on Tool book of a Nuremberg knight from 1505
There’s nothing delusional about what he said.

AI is being used for the most part to shit out as much “content” as possible in order to show ads, sell courses and other products (bonus points if what is sold is itself also pure AI slop), or to finish tasks at work with as little effort as can be done, so that boss man is impressed by the velocity. “Who cares about quality? This is 2026, bro.”

The actual thoughtful use of AI is the minority case. Not the default. We humans are lazy, and when we can get away with less effort we put as little effort as we can into things.

QuantumNomad_··on Show HN: Steal My Bitcoin
> that's good news because my webserver also has logging

In the future, every website will carry a little blurb of text in the footer of their pages intended to scare off would-be hackers and their AI agents:

“The server of this website employs append-only remote logging and state-of-the-art monitoring and intrusion detection. Unauthorized access or attempts there of WILL be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The outcome of such prosecution is and always will be astronomical amounts of money in damages that the guilty party will pay to the victim, alongside decades of prison time for the party guilty of computer crimes. Do not even try.”

QuantumNomad_··on Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone
> The FFMPEG folks should try porting the whole codebase to Rust too.

They don’t seem convinced that that would be a meaningful use of time for them. (2025)

https://itsfoss.com/news/ffmpeg-swipe-at-rust/

And 6 months ago someone did a little experiment using Claude to rewrite FFmpeg in Rust. It was by the own description by the person that had the AI do it, significantly slower than FFmpeg even when incorporating assembly code from FFmpeg.

https://github.com/sharifhsn/wedeo

Maybe with further advancements it is now possible to get a better result, or soon.

But if you are going to copy their assembly code into the Rust protect how do you definitively prove that no memory unsafe operations are happening in those parts? Seems to me that either the whole thing should be safe Rust, if the point of the rewrite is memory safety.

QuantumNomad_··on Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone
> The best solution would be ditching it completely for a simpler subset of features. But that will never happen.

Like the saying goes:

Everyone uses only 20% of the features, but it's a different 20% for different people.

QuantumNomad_··on Show HN: Uberblok – an interactive museum of ZFS internals
>> I use it with ... most of my external disks with macOS

> How do you personally deal with the terrible macOS default SAMBA client

I almost never use SMB. The external disks in question are drives that I connect via USB3 or USB4/Thunderbolt to the MacBook Pro, including a couple 5-bay multi-drive DAS enclosures that have USB4/Thunderbolt.

QuantumNomad_··on Docker is weird
Thanks for making Docker :)

Prior to the creation of Docker, did you have experience with other containerization technologies like Solaris Zones and FreeBSD Jails?

Did you at some point, either prior to or after making Docker for Linux, consider building something like Docker on top of FreeBSD Jails?

As a user of both Linux and FreeBSD, running Docker containers and Jails on each of them respectively, it would be interesting to see what FreeBSD Jails could be with something like Docker built on top of it while also taking advantage of other features on FreeBSD like fully using ZFS snapshots, ZFS send/recv, ZFS clone, vnet, and so on. Such that spinning up a container would under the hood receive ZFS snapshots from the “Docker registry” equivalent server, and it might clone the snapshot locally before starting up a container instance so that multiple container instances would be using the same locally available ZFS snapshot that was received once from the “Docker registry” equivalent.

QuantumNomad_··on Show HN: Uberblok – an interactive museum of ZFS internals
I absolutely love ZFS. I use it on FreeBSD for all disks on the whole system, including the ones that FreeBSD itself is installed on, and I use it with some disks on Linux and with most of my external disks with macOS.

In an alternative universe, Mac OS X would have gotten ZFS shipped with the base install back in 2007, and presumably we’d then still have that to this day. In our universe that ended up not happening even though it was supposed to :/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/04/28/revisiting-zfs-for-mac/

I really would have loved to have the whole of macOS running on ZFS. But at least using ZFS from homebrew on macOS to have ZFS on external disks is the next best thing after that, and which we do have.

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